John Paskievich is a freelance photographer and filmmaker who immigrated to Montréal from Austria in 1953. In 1959 his family relocated to Winnipeg. Paskievich studied sociology and anthropology as an undergraduate student at the University of Winnipeg. It was only after a trip to Europe following his graduation that he discovered he might prefer photography, playing the role of the photo-snapping tourist both at home and abroad. He enrolled as a photography student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, and in 1978 received nationwide attention in Canada for his first solo show, A Place Not Our Own. This series of seventy-one black and white photographs is an exploration of the North End of Winnipeg, an area where large populations of European immigrants and First Nations of Canada mingle. Paskievich has described both groups as strangers, the Europeans strangers in a new land, the Native peoples strangers in their own land. In 1980 the artist travelled to Europe to amass a collection of images of the people of the Eastern Bloc, a personal pilgrimage that resulted in the show, A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands (1988). In his films Paskievich has explored similar themes, looking at a legendary Ukrainian-Canadian who saw the changes of a period of over twenty years in north end Winnipeg in Ted Baryluk’s Grocery (1982). This film features Ted talking about his store, the many people he has seen come and go in the neighbourhood, and his hope that his daughter may take over the store after he has gone, even though she wants to move away. It is "a wistful rendering of a shopkeeper's relationship with his daughter and a fascinating portrait of a neighbourhood and its inhabitants" (Christiane Talbot, 1998), which received numerous awards including a Genie Award in Toronto, and which was chosen to represent Canada at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Paskievich told the story of a farmer’s hardship in Price of Daily Bread (1986), and explored the relationship between humans and wilderness in the 1987 Heart Land. In 1988 his film The Old Believers examined aspects of life in an isolated northern Alberta community whose Orthodox Christian lifestyles are threatened. He has also sought to explore First Nations life in Canada, looking at three Inuit carvers in Sedna: The Making of a Myth (1992), and following the journey of three aboriginal elders from Manitoba to the Czech Republic in If Only I Were an Indian (1996).